A Question of Freedom

"Television spokesmen, particularly NBC's, are getting positively paranoiac." So wrote the New York Herald Tribune's Critic John Crosby last week in his syndicated TV column. Crosby was dealing with the widely heard argument that "the quiz and payola mess is deliberately being overplayed by newspapers to embarrass a competing advertising medium." Said Crosby, summing up the feelings of most newsmen and editors: "This would be a serious charge if it weren't so naive."

Critic Crosby quoted Dave Garroway ("normally quite sane") to the effect that TV critics are "paid by one advertising medium to destroy another." He also quoted a parable of Jack Paar's, likening some TV columnists to a prostitute who got religion and thereafter saw sin everywhere. Commented Crosby: "The great weakness of the broadcasting business is that there is no separation of powers as there is in publishing. In radio and television, stars like Garroway live under the immediate and intimate control of their advertisers. It's unimaginable to Garroway that in 13 years as a radio and television critic I have yet to hear a word from the advertising department or from an advertiser or from a publisher or an editor to lay on or to lay off or to do anything except to have a decent respect for the laws of libel.

"This is the normal procedure in the newspaper business, but it's almost impossible to explain this to anyone in broadcasting. I don't mean to say that publishers don't enjoy the discomfiture of the broadcasters. But a conspiracy to denigrate the medium--the publishers whipping on their hired hacks to flay television --exists only in the broadcasters' own minds. Occasionally, newspapers have overplayed the quiz scandal, as they overplay a murder story. Sheer overzealousness. But why impugn our motives in the process? Even where you find newspapers and TV stations in the same corporate family, there is no common policy or purpose. No editorial staffer I know of is asked to plug the boss's TV station any more than he's asked to belt the opposition. The tradition is freedom to observe and report the facts as they are.

"It's the tradition of freedom that people like Garroway and Paar can't understand because they've never had any."

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